A place for melancholy

Perhaps I should title this post "In defense of melancholy."Attracted by the mist and the sun rising behind the trees this morning, I opened a living room door, leaned out and took this photo of the garden. I posted it on Instagram. Several people commented, a rather rare occurrence on Instagram, so I interpreted this to mean they found this image particularly appealing or moving in some way. One of the comments was, "heartbreaking," another, "haunting." I compared it to a painting of the Hudson River School. Someone else said, Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter (and a favorite of mine).What do these comments have in common? I think they point to melancholy ... to my sensibility one of the most powerful emotions experienced in the garden, and in the landscape. And it's a much richer and fuller emotion than most people--today--believe.I'm reading Melancholy and the Landscape:  Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape, by Jacky Bowring, published by Routledge in 2017. Here are two brief quotations:"Melancholy is at once complex and contradictory. For some it is an emotion, for others a mental illness, or even a mood, a disposition, an affect, an effect. Melancholy’s extensive history ranges across everything from cures for something considered a disease, to paeans to its poignant beauty. While in the Dark Ages the ‘melancholy of monks’ –also called acedia –necessitated a redoubling of prayer and an extra dose of courage, by the Romantic era melancholy was a source of inspiration for the poetry of Milton, Coleridge and Keats. Melancholy imbues artworks from Dürer’s Melancolia I (1514) to Anselm Kiefer’s Melancholia (1989), literature from Shakespeare to Sebald, and music from the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to Nick Cave.  But it is to the landscape that this book turns."............."The overcoming of a single-minded pursuit of happiness needs to be yoked to an inclusive re-engagement with the breadth of emotions. Melancholy’s marginalisation results not only from a fear of sadness, but from the pervasive hesitancy about showing emotion that characterises the modern Western world. Even the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley revealed how his fear of displaying emotion limited his full appreciation of an evocative landscape, something which he later regretted. In a letter to ‘T.P. Esq.’ (Thomas Peacock), describing journeying through Switzerland, Shelley explained how, The hay was making under the trees; the trees themselves were aged, but vigorous, and interspersed with younger ones, which are destined to be their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a shade to future worshippers of nature, who love the memory of that tenderness and peace of which this was the imaginary abode. We walked forward among the vineyards, whose narrow terraces overlook this affecting scene. Why did the cold maxims of the world compel me at this moment to repress the tears of melancholy transport which it would have been so sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until the darkness of night had swallowed up the objects which excited them? (Shelley, 1845, p.96)"I don't know if anyone will read this, so I leave it as a reminder to myself to return to this subject at greater length in the future.For anyone interested, I highly recommend Jacky Bowring's intriguing and fascinating exploration of melancholy in the landscape.